Bush and National Security

The Washington Post has an illuminating article on the Guantanamo case before the Supreme Court today. See here for background on military commissions.

We went into Afghanistan because of 9/11. Why did the intelligence community fail to foresee or prevent it? From the report of the 9/11 commission:

Commenting on Pearl Harbor,Roberta Wohlstetter found it "much easier after the event to sort the relevant from the irrelevant signals.After the event,of course, a signal is always crystal clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling since the disaster has occurred. But before the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings. ...With that caution in mind,we asked ourselves,before we judged others,whether the insights that seem apparent now would really have been
meaningful at the time,given the limits of what people then could reasonably have known or done. We believe the 9/11 attacks revealed four kinds of failures in:

• imagination (see bin Laden memo)
• policy (see NBC report)
• capabilities (see Washington Post on translators)
• and management (see map of intelligence community)

Our Monday class accurately predicted how the president would respond to the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran (full transcript here):

QUESTION: My question, sir, is are you feeling troubled about your standing here today about perhaps facing a credibility gap with the American people?

PRESIDENT: No. I'm feeling pretty spirited -- pretty good about life. And I made the decision to come before you so I could explain the NIE. And I have said Iran is dangerous. And the NIE doesn't do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world. Quite the contrary. I'm using this NIE as an opportunity to continue to rally our colleagues and allies. The NIE makes it clear that the strategy we have used in the past is effective.

Iran: New Intel...New Policy?

After the news that Iran's covert nuclear weapons program is inactive and has been since 2003, as reported in the NIE yesterday, many are asking: will the Bush administration's aggressive policy and rhetoric towards Iran change?

The New York Times published a couple interesting articles on this subject, see: the foreign policy debate,how the 2005 NIE was so wrong, and Bush's response.

President Bush held a press conference Tuesday and answered several questions on the new findings. It's interesting to see how Bush uses the NIE to support his current policy. Even though the intel community reported with "high confidence" that Iran halted their nuclear weapons program years ago, in direct opposition to the premise for the current foreign policy agenda towards Iran, Bush maintained that the information confirmed his current approach.

With the new intelligence, Bush seemed optimistic that the NIE could help him further his foreign policy objectives concerning Iran, saying:

"To me, the NIE provides an opportunity for us to rally the international community -- continue to rally the community to pressure the Iranian regime to suspend its program."

Bush spins the report in an effort to make it cohesive with his current approach--illustrating an intimate and difficult relationship between intelligence and policy.